Category — Coffee Gadgets

New York coffeeshop Roasting Plant Coffee Company is pioneering an interesting design for the sale and delivery of their coffee–by turning the entire store into a coffee machine. Dubbed the “Javabot”, in truth it seems to be really just the various aspects of a typical roasting plant and retail shop joined together by pneumatic tubes and controlled by a central computer, but the idea is quite cool.

Founded by a manufacturer engineer and former Starbucks executive, I guess it’s not surprising that the focus is on mechanical efficiency and reproducibility rather than the more “touchy-feely” aspects of a coffeeshop. But the design is surprisingly elegant and it seems like it’d be easy to stand at the ordering station, watching your beans rush throughout the tubes in the store and into your cup, and imagine you’re in some culinary sci-fi movie.

It definitely seems like a Javabot would be a godsend to a proprietor of a small shop who works and runs everything himself. Many years ago I did this, running a quaint little shop as the sole employee–taking drink orders, filling coffee bags and bins, cleaning up after guests, doing the dishes, etc. While I like the personal touch of small shops, I can’t deny that a Javabot would really have come in handy in those days. I doubt the Javabot technology would be affordable to someone like that, but if it was, it could vastly improve what it means to truly “run your own shop”.

(Thanks to Mark for sending me the link.)

Starbucks announced the other day that it has bought the Coffee Equipment Company, makers of the much-ballyhooed Clover brewing machine, for an undisclosed sum. Apparently Starbucks intends to put Clovers in all but the smallest stores, as part of Howard Schultz’s overall push to increase quality in his stores and slow the recent but increasing decline in Big Green’s growth.

Considering that Clover brewers sell at well over $8000 each, this is no small feat. The Clover made waves when it debuted a couple of years ago, claiming to have perfected the four variables of coffee-brewing: time, temperature, grind, and extraction ratio. It was the product of several years of research and development by Zander Nosler and was practically an overnight success–at the moment there are only 200-300 Clovers operating in retail stores around the world, but at that $8-10k a pop, that’s a serious chunk of change.

The Clover has many devoted fans, but I must admit that while I admire Coffee Equipment Company’s engineering savvy I never really bought into the device. Most of its programmable features are present in a Fetco Extractor at a quarter of the price, thought the Extractor doesn’t work on a per-cup basis. It’s meant to do per-cup servings consistently at high volumes, but if your volume’s that high, why not just brew a whole airpot? And if your volume’s low enough for a cup at a time, why not just use a French press and a temp-adjustable tabletop water boiler? I’ve had great coffee out of a Clover, but nothing better than what I’ve had, say, from a Bodum French press using a correctly-measured amount of grounds.

Now, though, the point may well be academic. Because Schultz is in effect literally taking the Clover off the market, since it will now only be used to brew Starbucks’ own coffee–which seems like just pointless theater, since the coffee is roasted so poorly that no $8,000 brewer is going to fix it. As Greg Sherwin over at TheShot coffee blog very aptly put it: “Who buys a $30,000 sound system to listen to AM talk radio?”

Researchers and chemical engineers at Nestle in Switzerland have invented a machine that analyzes the gas espresso gives off when heated, “translating” the ion compositions into taste notes like “roasted, flowery, woody, toffee and acidity.” It’s imaginatively called an “electronic taster,” and was originally conceived as a quality control device for the major players in the coffee industry.

I found it interesting that adding a mere 5% Robusta to the espresso blends threatened the model, since the better Robustas can have radically divergent flavor profiles:

The espresso coffees selected for this study were blended mainly from different Arabica varieties with some Robusta (5% Robusta in average). Blending Arabica with Robusta varieties has shown to add complexity to the model and adds some uncertainty in the prediction of the sensory profiles, but the model still shows reliable results. Models obtained with pure Robusta and Arabica samples separately (data not shown here) show results which are more accurate. Nevertheless, predicting the sensory profile of a new coffee depends very much on the diversity of samples used for constructing the model. The broader the sensory and analytical space of the samples included in developing the model, the more robust the model.

Read more about this amazing machine in Analytical Chemistry, which recently published an article detailing the workings of the machine (and from which the quote above is taken). For my own part, my own palette and I don’t feel particularly threatened, and don’t anticpate a day where I walk in and see RoboCop manning my San Franciscan.